Books December 1983
Saying no to life
A review of Tolstoy And Gandhi by William C. Green.
Professor Martin Green has set himself a bold task. Tolstoy and Gandhi, Men of Peace1 is the double biography of two extraordinary men, both of whom exerted enormous influence over their contemporaries, combined into what amounts to a single, intertwined “life.” As he explains in his introduction: “The plan of this book is to present the two lives side by side, in all their various phases, in such a way as to reveal the historical forces to which they were always responding.” This results in a succession of parallel phases in which Professor Green detects marked psychological and ideological similarities; he intersperses his discussions of these with expositions of the common ground he finds himself treading.
These parallel periods are of course staggered chronologically, since the lives only partially overlapped. Tolstoy was...
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